A Woman Bravely Embraces Freedom

March 18, 2007|By SUSAN CAMPBELL; Courant Staff Writer

INFIDEL: MY LIFE By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

(Free Press, 355 pp., $26)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's haunting memoir, ``Infidel,'' starts thus:

``One November morning in 2004, Theo van Gogh got up to work at his film production company in Amsterdam. He took out his old black bicycle and headed down a main road. Waiting in a doorway was a Moroccan man with a handgun and two butcher knives.

``As Theo cycled down the Linnaeusstraat, Muhammad Bouyeri approached. He pulled out his gun and shot Theo several times. Theo fell off his bike and lurched across the road, then collapsed. Bouyeri followed. Theo begged, ``Can't we talk about this?'' but Bouyeri shot him four more times. Then he took out his butcher knives and sawed into Theo's throat. With the other knife, he stabbed a five-page letter onto Theo's chest.

``The letter was addressed to me.''

If there is a more dramatic start to a memoir, I haven't read it, and Hirsi Ali, now a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, never lets up in her taut retelling of her short and eventful life.

Van Gogh was a film director who had earlier worked from a script by Hirsi Ali on the controversial 2004 short documentary ``Submission,'' which criticized the abuse of Muslim women. He was killed later that year, and Hirsi Ali, one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2005 and winner of numerous humanitarian awards, went into hiding.

Her story is the stuff of movies. Born to a Somali intellectual educated at Columbia University and a religious zealot, she was beaten by her mother, abandoned by her father and forced at age 5 to submit to ritual genital mutilation that her family believed would keep her pure until her wedding night.

During the excruciating procedure, her grandmother comforts her:

``It's just this once in your life, Ayaan. Be brave, he's almost finished.''

Her sister suffers even more from the botched operation, and it isn't until decades later that Hirsi Ali learns how rare it is to so carve up little girls.

In a complicated world of clans and cousins, Hirsi Ali at first is the most devout Muslim in her family. She wears a body-covering hidjab, but always there is the nagging notion that Allah never meant for her to be second-best. Early on, she and her sister tell their father, who is often on diplomatic trips or in jail, that they don't want to be girls.

Oddly, she begins to get a glimmer of the secular world from Western writers such as Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steele.

``All these books, even the trashy ones, carried with them ideas -- races were equal, women were equal to men -- and concepts of freedom, struggle and adventure that were new to me,'' Hirsi Ali writes.

She begins to question a culture that gives her secondary status, that permits men to beat her, that precludes pursuing an education. She travels to try to rescue family members stranded by a civil war, and her eyes are opened forever to the wider world.

The messages she gleaned from the glitzy work of Cartland and Steele are reinforced when she is pledged in an arranged marriage to a man she doesn't know. Neither author's heroines were ever caught in such a trap, but Hirsi Ali is resourceful. On her way to meet her husband in Canada, she slips into Holland. It is the early '90s, and the country has munificent refugee programs. She enrolls in the prestigious Leiden University and becomes an interpreter for others who have escaped the fate that awaited her.

Eventually, she serves in the Dutch parliament. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America, she grows more disenchanted with the teachings of her girlhood and eventually establishes herself as an outspoken critic of Islam. She appears, however, to be most troubled by the particular honor-system Islam in which she was reared.

She quotes scriptures to show the Quran would not allow women to have power over their own lives (much less as members of Parliament), but most sacred-text scholars would be uncomfortable dismissing an entire religion based on cherry-picked scriptures. (A literal reading of I Cor. 11:14-15, for example, would appear to instruct women to have long hair. Next time you're in church, count the long-haired women.)

Still, Hirsi Ali has arrived at her conclusions after much thought and pain, and this is a disturbing and uncomfortable book.